Drip | Run | Freeze | Crack | Melt

JULY 26, 2024 – SEPTEMBER 21, 2024

Featuring work by:

Brenda Biondo (Manitou Springs, CO), Jarod Charzewski (Charleston, SC), James Tapscott (Victoria, AUS), and Christopher Warren (Durango, CO)

In the era of Anthropocene, every action caries the weight of environmental consequence. When the world teeters on the brink of critical mass, artists retreat to their studios, igniting the creative spirit. The quartet featured in Drip | Run | Freeze | Crack | Melt confronts this reality head-on, embracing beauty and play as potent tools for conservation, education, and social change. The exhibition deftly maneuvers between works; from a machine that visualizes watershed data, to physical representations of local water systems, arresting depictions of shadows asking to be closely examined and even mesmerizing hues extracted from ancient ice under microscopic scrutiny. Through art, potentially, we can reframe the narrative and cast a hopeful glow on the profound emotional upheavals our planet, and those who inhabit it, grapple with in this current moment.

Documentation

Christopher Warren
Water Shedding

Rivers carve the world around us alongside gravity and time. The topography that the rivers form are contextualized in these pieces by the area of land where all the water that falls onto that area flows out through one exit, also known as a watershed. These fractal shapes on the map are very different from the euclidean lines we draw as humans to parse out the land, magnifying these shapes refers back to how natural processes truly shape our earth.

Christopher Warren is a Colorado based artist known for his intricate depictions of topographic landscapes. Born and raised in Durango, Colorado, the rugged beauty of the surrounding mountains and desert canyons sparked his fascination with topography at a young age. Warren’s sculptures are a testament to his deep reverence for the natural world and his desire to capture its most captivating features in three-dimensional form. Through his work, Warren invites viewers to immerse themselves in the intricate contours of the earth and contemplate the power and beauty of the natural world.

His work is currently represented by Walker Fine Art in Denver, Colorado.

Jarod Charzewski
By The Gallon

Jarod Charzewski draws inspiration from the vanishing snowpack in the Boulder, Colorado area for his artwork. His aim is to raise awareness about the critical movement of water throughout the Colorado River Basin, with a specific focus on the Lake Powell River Basin.

Through his work, he seeks to emphasize the delicate balance of natural water systems and the profound impact of climate change on these essential resources. The diminishing snowpack not only represents a loss of natural beauty but also signifies a deeper environmental crisis affecting the entire region.

His artistic journey involves capturing the stark contrasts between the once-abundant snow-covered landscapes and their current, more arid state. Using a kinetic installation, he strives to reflect the movement of water over the past 48 years, based on actual data from waterdata.com. Each ball in the installation symbolizes a moment in the water cycle, depicting 274 acre-feet of water flowing into Lake Powell, which receives meltwater from the Rocky Mountain snowcaps. Participants activate this representation by pushing a switch, initiating the journey of water from its high-altitude origins in the snow-capped Rockies downstream, where it nourishes ecosystems and communities along the way.

Influenced by the urgency of environmental conservation and inspired by Colorado’s majestic landscapes, his work serves as both a tribute and a call to action. He hopes to evoke a sense of responsibility and stewardship in viewers, encouraging them to contemplate the future of water resources and engage in efforts to preserve these crucial natural systems for future generations.

Jarod Charzewski grew up in the inner city of Winnipeg where the attitudes and esthetics of an urban setting took hold. He also spent time on a family farm in rural Manitoba. This combination of surroundings is where he gained appreciation for natural and manufactured landscapes. He fuels his art with visuals of change; landscapes and recreates aesthetics that investigate mankind’s evolving influence. Artistically, he uses these sensations to release ethereality in site-specific experiences. He holds a BFA from the University of Manitoba (1996) and an MFA from the University of Minnesota (2005). He has received artist grants from several US and Canadian arts organizations including the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canadian Council for the Arts, as well as receiving a Puffin Award for the environmental content of his work. He has exhibited across the US and Canada including such venues as the Grand Canyon National Park for a site-specific installation, Le Biennale de Montreal in Montreal, and Quebec, the Bunnell Arts Center in Homer, Alaska. In addition, in Spring of 2018 he had a mid-career retrospective at the Begovich Gallery at the University of Southern California, Fullerton. He currently holds the position of Associate Professor at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina.

Brenda Biondo
A Legacy of Shadows

A Legacy of Shadows is concerned with the fracturing of nature and the poignancy of acknowledging beauty in a time of destruction, and is informed by her previous career as a writer specializing in environmental issues. The naturally blue shadows in these images show how the act of looking can sometimes reveal unexpected aspects of light and the natural world.

To create these images, she places rolled, cut and/or folded pieces of blank white paper on the ground (which is sometimes snow-covered) and takes photographs of shadows cast by trees and other plants in the landscape. The blueness of the shadows is a result of the geographic locations where the photographs are made, since areas of high-altitude and/or exceptionally clear air allow greater scattering of sunlight’s blue wavelengths, causing ambient light to produce colored shadows. The angles of the paper dictate the hue and luminosity of the shadows.

Brenda Biondo is a Colorado artist who uses traditional camera techniques and a formalist aesthetic to explore atmospheric light and color and their role in the construct of landscape. Her images engage the phenomena of sunlight to provide a framework for our meditative experience of being in nature, while challenging viewers’ perception of color and three-dimensional space. She often uses unconventional contexts to demonstrate how traditional photography can still show us new visions of common subjects.

Her work is currently represented by Michael Warren Contemporary in Denver, Colorado.

James Tapscott
400 Millenia / 5 Microns

This photographic project began in 2018 during a residency in Boulder, Colorado, through Swoon Art House and BMoCA. I visited the NSFICF, where they store core samples of Ice extracted from Antarctica – from around 4km deep (dating them at approximately 400,000 years old). The fragility of these is remarkable, as is the fact they have survived intact, frozen for so long so that we can now study them – and find ways to ensure they continue to remain frozen and not become victims of climate change.

My work often takes familiar / everyday / natural materials and re-presents and re- contextualizes them to form a new experience for the viewer. This hopefully leads to a new understanding and appreciation of the world around us, and a new, more balanced relationship with nature. In this instance, the ice is displayed as pure colour – an effect created by using crossed polarizing filters during the photographic process. Each sample is about the size of a playing card, just a few inches across and between 12 and 30 macro photos are taken of each one before being stitched together in photoshop. The images are then printed onto back-lit media and displayed in circular light-boxes, returning them to their original circular shape of the drill core sample. Scientists study these to determine the physical forces at play in these deep sections of ice, and can read the shape, size, colour and various patterning of the crystal array to glean vast amounts of information.

The temperature in the storage facility is a brutal -30F (-34C), making the process of capturing these images quite an undertaking. Thankfully with the help of the staff at NSFICF Denver and IMAS Hobart I was able to produce this body of work. It has also contributed to their research in highlighting the value of visual documentation, and IMAS implemented this into their practice.

Australian based land and light artist, James Tapscott has evolved a multi-disciplinary practice combining natural phenomena and light to create new experiences of the familiar. His site responsive and experiential works are designed to create a heightened awareness of nature and its connection to the self, encouraging us to embrace a state of coexistence with the natural environment.

His use of ephemeral materials, particularly water, mist and light enable a creative partnership between artist and site – the artwork often isn’t fully realized until both collaborators have finished telling their story. His works have been installed extensively throughout Asia as well as Europe and the USA. Upcoming permanent installations include sites in Seoul, Melbourne, Wuhan and Oklahoma City. A temporary version of his iconic work, Arc ZERO: Nimbus is currently on view at Green Mountain Falls, CO.

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